stultify

Not for Gardiner the pietistically devotional approach that can stultify.

From New York Times ● Mar. 31, 2022

He puts the yawn into stultify, the stupefy into catatonia, stone-facedly delivering the exact same chords, licks, and nasal delivery for over three decades over a backbeat that would have lost the Boer War.

From Salon ● Jul. 11, 2012

So when this cafeteria culture hits the big city, does the collision somehow stultify economic activity? Cities, after all, need people out on the sidewalks.

From New York Times ● Jul. 2, 2011

The reason is the feeling in jazz that if you print something, if you write down the notes, you will stultify the music.

From The Guardian ● Aug. 12, 2010

There had been a deep instinct, like one of nature's cruel yet righteous laws, in Milly's withdrawal; to have consented, to have compromised, would have been to stifle and stultify herself.

From The Nest, The White Pagoda, The Suicide, A Forsaken Temple, Miss Jones and The Masterpiece by Sedgwick, Anne Douglas

Gems include a rant on critics, the assertion that the paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing and how writing helped alleviate his stultified misery after a near-death car accident.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 14, 2025

Now they had been moved to this motel with its shared toilets and atmosphere of stultified trauma.

From New York Times ● Aug. 4, 2020

All these lessons leave me stultified; The hours in the day just drag along — I think they’ve multiplied!

From Washington Post ● Apr. 30, 2020

The stultified senators should distract themselves with dice cricket, a game beloved by indoorsy British children.

From Slate ● Jan. 23, 2020

There was a poetic vein in young Ainsleigh, but troubles from his earliest childhood had stultified it considerably.

From The Mandarin's Fan by Hume, Fergus

For Jews, the stultifying fact to be faced is that antisemitism has nothing to do with Jews.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 21, 2025

Because of the SSA’s stultifying culture, Dudek said, he leaned into his insubordinate streak.

From Salon ● Sep. 9, 2025

There have always been those who found the place, with its pretentious airs, dilatory pacing and stultifying rules of order, a frustrating environment to work in, much less thrive.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 18, 2025

In reality, the most powerful force in the modern American city is the stultifying status quo.

From Slate ● Sep. 16, 2024

“What are these? Visual aids for civics or some other equally stultifying high school subject?”

From "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole